North Korea? Pretty sure some central apartments or houses in Pyongyang are accessible only for the elite (which may have different mechanism to obtain than just having enough cash but logic is same - many many want to live there, only the top gets them). There are few other countries.
The point is, it doesn't matter. Jobs and services are centralized to cities or their outskirts, thus folks move in. The only reason why properties cost there so much. Not sure what are you even trying to say with your last sentence, pretty self-contradictory. If all could work 100% from home we would see suburbia explode in prices and development. Not happening in way I mean this century, cities are growing as fast as possible (and some more, thanx to also people like you).
> Not sure what are you even trying to say with your last sentence, pretty self-contradictory.
Not self contradictory at all. The sentence i was responding said hundreds of thousands want all to live “at the same place”. But they don’t all want to live “at the same place”. They just want to live at a good place. Mainly one where they can find a job. If we create more good places to live at they will be happy to live at the other good places. Instead of concentrating all the economic activity to a few places we could incentivise many smaller towns with good jobs so not everyone needs to live “at the same place”.
> If all could work 100% from home we would see suburbia explode in prices and development.
Didn’t say anything about working from home. Not sure what you are arguing against here.
This is exactly right, you captured my sentiment pretty well
What exactly is the endgame here? Build rows and rows of mile high apartment buildings indefinitely?
It’s not an easy problem to solve and the way people just beat the bUiLd mOrE drum is super annoying because you can’t just build with wreckless abandon it’s not that simple
Sure you can. It requires a responsible government to align incentives. There is no axiomatic problem for building enough housing. The problem is the housing-as-investment paradigm, which only works if there is a perpetual housing shortage to drive prices well above values. Housing-as-investment creates a vicious cycle of shortage and incentivized harms to society in the interest of driving prices of housing up via a lack of desirable options.
To have a decent society for our children in a growing country, housing cannot be an investment. The value of a house must generally track downward with the depreciation of its structure. You need to separate the cost of housing from the cost of land, and in cities at least, tax land in accordance with its utility, encouraging vertical development in high population density areas.
The key to this working efficiently is responsible planning and zoning. Single family dwellings / 1-2 story housing is not likely to be viable adjacent to growing urban areas. Zoning should reflect this. This disincentives building single family homes in these areas, since taxation will be based on the fact that the lot could house a.32 unit condo, minimum lot sizes also reflect that planning, so property taxes would become quickly onerous for a single family home. If you want to live in a city, you should be amenable to living in a higher population density dwelling. I would imagine that for people that like their ___location, development deals that include a ground floor or penthouse apartment in exchange for part of the land value to a developer would become part of the norm. That way you can step out of the way, live somewhere else for 6 months and come home to your new flat. OTOH if you are just rich and stubborn, you can just pay the taxes.. but that will curtail the value of the home to a reasonable level. The current system rewards instead of penalizes homeowners for standing in the way of progress. At least tax revenues can be useful to the community.
Yeah dude you completely missed what I said I guess - I said you can’t build with wreckless abandon which means with “responsible government” as you put it
Oh, well, it’s not the first time I have demonstrated my capacity for stupidity. Maybe I read a different comment and answered yours, or maybe II didn’t really read it completely before I decided what it said. Either way, my apologies.
There are solutions, I think, to most of our issues… but the bias to avoid losing more than we are willing to invest to gain hobbles us.
